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The SaaS Venture

21: Frameworks

The SaaS Venture
The SaaS Venture


Full episode show notes:

[INTRO music]

00:13 Aaron Weiche: Episode 21, Frameworks.

00:16 INTRO: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins and losses shared in each episode from Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.

[music]

00:43 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast, I'm Aaron.

00:46 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.

00:46 AW: And I am currently living summer to its fullest the last few weeks. How about you?

00:55 DS: I wouldn't call it to the fullest. [chuckle] I'm living summer to the "halfest". I'm doing some summary things, but I feel like I need to get out more. We're a little apprehensive about going out, spending enough time outside. We should get out more. More walks, more bike rides.

01:10 AW: There you go, I think it's a good idea. In regards to COVID, I would say that the easiest way I surmise our family and definitely having kids with high school activities and sports and those things are like on their own trajectory, but we've moved from isolation to limitation. And a lot of it's just limiting like what are bad ideas? Going to a bar, for me, I'd rather not go get a haircut, I'm lucky Marcy's been cutting my hair. I'm in no hurry to jump on a plane. I'm not going to the health club. I'm doing long walks just about every day, but no weights or strength training or any of that but yeah, just trying to get back to as much as normal. If I'm in a store, I'm in a mask, just that kind of stuff, just trying to be as smart as possible and distancing and preventative things without... Yeah, the bunker life in a family of six and when you have a 16-year-old and a 14-year-old, it just won't work.

02:10 DS: I can imagine, yeah. Yeah, it's not that dissimilar from what we're doing, so pretty much every night after dinner, I get outside with Violet, and we'll go for a walk or bike ride and Jill comes for most of those, too, so we're doing that, we're getting out and just sort of going outside when the weather is decent. Yeah, and definitely, mostly not going into any stores. If I did have to I would bring a mask. But for the most part, I haven't been to a store in over a month 'cause we get everything delivered. Our groceries are all delivered or curbside pickup and so it's been really easy that way.

02:42 AW: It's an interesting thing when you're out, and when you're wearing a mask, and just the human energy between those wearing masks, those not wearing masks, just all... You see the collision in people's eyes of political views and personal views and their rights and oh, so many things, I don't know.

02:58 DS: My freedom?

03:00 AW: Yes, it's quite an interesting thing.

03:02 DS: Yeah, totally. I follow this group on Nextdoor for our neighborhood and wow, some of the posts over there are really blowing up with the two sides clashing, people talking about their freedoms to not wear masks, and people trying to educate them on the benefits of masks. But man, there's that one group that can't get their head around the mask only being for them, and they don't see the benefit of it from the other perspective, which is you wear the mask to protect others. And it's faced with all of the information being presented to them, they still can't wrap their head around that. It seems to me. There's probably lots of people like that.

03:36 AW: Yeah, it's tricky folks. Definitely, I don't know, I don't know if it's pride. If it's vanity, I don't know if it truly is freedom or just being told what to do, or the fact that there's just so many people not willing to believe anything from any source at any time, right. The... I don't know, I can't handle all the conspiracy theories, what a hole to go down these days right.

03:57 DS: Oh my God, yeah, I know, I haven't really gone down the holes, but I've seen glimpses of them and I'm like, Wow.

[laughter]

04:04 AW: Who knows?

04:05 DS: Some things they're thinking, yeah.

04:06 AW: Yes, you'll never get out if you go in. So I think what you're doing is why it's just kind of walk around the edge and find a new path.

04:13 DS: Yeah, totally, totally. How are things going at Gather Up these days, what's going on?

04:18 AW: Good. I think the easiest way to state it is just stability, things have become more stable from what's gone on as we've talked. We've had over a month since our last episode and things have really stabilized. The things that you see more than anything is, one, for me personally, like new sales are just slow and I'm mostly dealing with larger multi-location all the way up to enterprise-type deals, and really more than anything, it's like taking on something new, implementing a new tool and building process, or some companies would call change management. That's the obstacle right now. More so than spending budgets. And when you look, it's really easy to understand, it was the same for our business, especially the first eight to 10 weeks of COVID and what was taking place, it was like every minute was filled with a special meeting or a task force, or talking about how things were trending, what numbers churn, paused billing.

So you can understand that inside of these other businesses that not only have that, but then have entered a reopening phase and changing protocols and health measures and communication and all these other things. So it's easy to see why they've probably just said like, "Hey, just keep on keeping on right now and let's not introduce anything new, look we have enough to deal with."

05:45 DS: I think that's exactly it. Everyone's busy and they're getting back to business for the most part, but some things are lower priority and that concept of stability makes perfect sense. Let's just keep things going as they are, so we can focus on all this other stuff.

06:01 AW: And as I pointed out with our stand-up team meeting today is what has really spoken well for us is just retention. Our April was down, but our May, we were not down, we were on the plus side, very little, but still on the plus side, which was really encouraging. June, as we record this headed into the last few days of June, is trending nicely for a percentage point or two of gain, which sounds fantastic, right now.

06:29 DS: Any gains, sounds pretty good.

06:30 AW: Exactly, and all of that's being done with basically almost no new sales, we have some of our resellers and agencies are expanding, our partners that resell us are expanding, but as far as things direct with us, that really isn't happening. So it's having just a high level of retention and you've already peeled away some of the people that were very fringe customers, not heavy users, don't find value, things like that, but overwhelmingly, the massive core hasn't needed or wanted to make any of those changes, so that's really sound. And I just shared with our team, that's a compliment all the way around, 'cause I really do believe that we have an outstanding product, but we have a phenomenal service layered over the top of it, and those two things combined absolutely lead to retention.

07:19 DS: Yeah, totally, I think there's also some nature of the business too with yours, I notice certainly, 'cause we're a GatherUp reseller white label version of it is like that always stayed relatively stable. We certainly saw some drops at the end of March, early April, but then it stabilized and we didn't see much because it's the kind of service that you just will always need, it's one of the ones where you're like, Yeah, okay, I can't cut that. It's a bit of an essential service, and I think that that's really helpful for GatherUp, and we're seeing it on our side too. Yeah.

07:52 AW: Other than that a lot of small litt...

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